JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
David, do you see something new and awful about this heat that erupted in the House of Representatives?
DAVID
BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: It’s not new, but awful. It’s like a
Eugene O’Neill play. They’ve got all these submerged hatreds, and it
only takes a little fissure to open them all up. And that’s what
happened yesterday.
What was striking about what happened with
the ag bill was that, first of all, the parties couldn’t agree what was
in the bill, and then they couldn’t agree on how the vote went about
the bill. And then when they had this whatever happened, the bit of
chaos, and the versions you get depend entirely on what party you’re
talking to, immediately the hatred erupted.
And it’s the same
hatred that erupted when Tom DeLay and others held the vote open a
couple of years ago, and that hatred is still there. And I don’t think
the procedures of the House have changed that much. The majority party
has changed, but a lot of the strong-arm tactics are sort of the same.
JIM LEHRER: Hatred is a strong word to use. Do you agree with David, who uses that word?
MARK
SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: No, I disagree with David. I think there
was a crankiness, there is a crankiness in the House right now, this
tension.
JIM LEHRER: Crankiness, not hatred?
MARK SHIELDS:
Crankiness. No, it was cranky. They’re tired. They’ve worked long
hours, and I think they’re ready to get out of there. And I think the
profound difference between what happened last night and what happened
with Tom DeLay, keeping the Medicare bill open for three hours, the
vote on the floor for three hours in total violation of the House
rules, and twisting arms and making threats on the House floor, was
that both Steny Hoyer, the majority leader — I thought who handled it
very well — and Mike McNulty, who was in the chair, said, “I was
wrong. I made a mistake.” I mean, I didn’t hear that in the DeLay era.
That was entirely different. Now…
JIM LEHRER: But David’s point
is that, whether or not it was an honest mistake or not, that
underlying the surface here is tension, and much more than tension.
MARK
SHIELDS: Well, I don’t know — I mean, I thought John Boehner was quite
measured and quite restrained. Roy Blunt, the Republican whip, was
different. And I think there’s no question that, within the Republican
caucus, there are people who are unreconstructed, just as there are
people on the Democratic side who are unreconstructed in any dealing
with the other side.
And I think Roy Blunt was speaking to and
for them, whereas John Boehner, who’s a fierce partisan and a very
loyal Republican, you know, was trying to think how he could make the
house work.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, they both have Machiavellian
reasons to want to make the House appear less angry because the
approval ratings of the Congress as a whole, and the House in
particular, are sub-Cheney, and they’re pretty terrible. So they both
have an incentive to make it seem like they’re both doing their job.
And
the big thing that has changed — this has been a long, gradual change
— is that members of each party are much less likely to care what
people in the other party think of them personally than used to be. And
so they’re perfectly happy to shout, “Shame,” or to behave in shameful
ways toward people in the other party.
::Tullycast:: 